Social TV services have recently been proposed in which users can store, share and discover bookmarks that point to multimedia clips taken from television and other video programming. The bookmarks, which can be created and shared through a user's set top box or other client device, are analogous to web-based social bookmarks that are offered by on-line services such as del.icio.us, for example. Such social TV services allow users to share clips from programs with friends and tag bookmarks for easy access. Users gain information on what friends are interested in and the producers of the tagged or bookmarked programs gain information about their viewers.
The bookmarked clips are usually short segments of video taken from a program such as a news or sporting event, a broadcast television series, a theatrical film and the like. A bookmarked clip is usually available on-demand. The creator of a bookmark may be able to tag each of their bookmarks with freely chosen index terms. The bookmarks that are posted by a user may be publicly viewable or they may be marked as private so that they are only available to selected viewers such as friends of the user who created the bookmark. Such friends may be defined by “buddy lists” and the like.
In one scenario, Mary is watching a program that she is recording on a DVR associated with her set top box. She decides to bookmark a clip of the program using her set top box and send the bookmark to Bob. The bookmark includes a thumbnail still image from the clip, an identifier of the clip and an address such as a URL or other pointer that specifies where the clip may be found. Bob receives the bookmark through his set top box and views the thumbnail image on his television or other display device. If Bob decides to watch the clip he can direct his set top box to access the clip at the address specified in the bookmark. If the DVR on which the clip is stored is incorporated in Mary's set top box, then the address will be the URL of Mary's set top box. On the other hand, if the DVR is a network DVR, the address that is specified in the bookmark will be the URL of the network DVR.